Voters sever all allegiance to historical ties

There’s a type of climate change sweeping the Australian political landscape. Extreme political events are becoming more common. Voter behaviour is increasingly volatile, no longer respecting the once predictable change of political season.

In the states, previously unimaginable landslide election results occur more regularly, and the scorched earth of opposition now devastates party finances and threatens long-term survival. State-level political parties can no longer rely on a “respectable loss" from which to recover to fight another day.

Voters have not inflicted the same damage on federal government – yet. But catastrophic opinion poll results for Labor are sounding a warning that the September 14 election may be the Big One.

The latest Australian Financial Review/Nielsen Poll released on Monday shows Labor’s support has plummeted and Prime Minister
Julia Gillard
has lost her lead over Opposition Leader
Tony Abbott
as preferred prime minister.

The poll shows that if voter sentiment is repeated on September 14, Labor will suffer a 6 per cent swing costing it up to 26 seats, or one-quarter of the Labor caucus.

Sure, there has been a litany of misery for the party over the past few months. It has broken its budget surplus promise and been tainted by the arrest of former Labor MP
Craig Thomson
, as well as by the alleged corruption in NSW state Labor ranks. It has also been surprised by the resignation of two senior ministers; withstood rumours about cuts to superannuation tax breaks; and most recently hamstrung by the woeful revenue collections from its contentious mining tax.

Despite a slight recovery in polling late last year, Labor has trailed the Coalition on a two-party-preferred basis, according to the Nielsen Poll, since it negotiated minority government after the 2010 election.

But there could be more to the poll results. Political watchers believe that an electorate set against Labor is part of a larger long-term trend that has seen an explosion in the number of swinging voters, triggering exaggerated results at election time that may threaten the stability of Australia’s two-party system.

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Nielsen pollster John Stirton says that for years the benchmark for a landslide election victory was NSW Liberal leader
Nick Greiner
’s 56 per cent two-party preferred win in 1988 over the
Barrie Unsworth
Labor government, which had been in power for 12 year under former Labor premier
Neville Wran
.

The more recent NSW Coalition victory of
Barry O’Farrell
with 68 per cent of the two-party preferred vote over the
Kristina Keneally
government in 2011 would be have been “unthinkable" back in 1988, Stirton says.

Similarly, Queensland Liberal National Party leader
Campbell Newman
’s 78-seat victory last year cut Labor’s seats to just seven, almost sinking it into minor party status.

Huge results like this have far-reaching ramifications not only for party fund-raising but also for access to taxpayer dollars to run these organisations.

Stirton says federally, election results are usually much narrower, say 51 per cent to 49 per cent. Even
Kevin Rudd
’s strong Labor election win in 2007 was closer than expected at 53 per cent to 47 per cent.

And
Malcolm Fraser
’s “massive" Coalition win of 55 per cent to
Gough Whitlam
’s 45 per cent in the 1975 election looks mediocre in light of Australia’s recent state results.

Stirton is not predicting the Gillard government will suffer a similar humiliation to Anna Bligh’s Labor government in Queensland last year or the NSW Keneally government, but he says leaders should prepare themselves for a long-term future of large voter swings.

Labor supporters were talking on Monday of a “dreadful pall of predictability" about the 2013 election result, but heroic last-minute rallies have occurred before.

There’s the famous 2001 election in which incumbent prime minister
John Howard
suffered a negative 19 point approval rating in pre-election polls. In April that year, the Coalition was trailing
Kim Beazley
’s Labor by 60 to 40 per cent in two-party-preferred and Howard’s own party leaked to the media that he was “mean and tricky".

Then the September 11 terrorist attacks happened, followed by the Tampa asylum seeker crisis. The Coalition recovered to win the election with a 2 per cent swing. “It proves it is possible to recover but I suspect it’s the exception rather than the rule," Stirton says.

Most of the time parties consistently behind in the polls are the losers on election night. In 1996, Howard was comfortably ahead of then prime minister
Paul Keating
for 18 months. And he won. In 2007, Rudd was miles ahead of Howard and also won.

Trevor Cook, adviser to
Bob Hawke
’s Labor government, is now a University of Sydney academic examining the relationship between Labor and unions. He says the class divide between the two major parties has broken down, so very few rusted-on Labor or Liberal voters remain to stabilise the electoral cycle.

“Voters are more likely to be loyal their entire lives to a football club than a political party these days," he says.Trade unions and religion used to be the genetic markers of political leaning. Now Catholic politicians are at the top of Conservative Party leadership and the traditional “tradie" is more likely to identify as a small business person than a union member.

An emotional attachment to ideology has been replaced by a three-yearly judgment on political competence.

“My father used to say the worst Labor government is better than the best Liberal government," Cook says.

“Once people decide to vote not like their parents voted, they see the world didn’t collapse, so they decide they might do it again."